Chapter Five: The Bet
949 Words
It started because of Soyeon and her terrible ideas.
They were in the cafeteria on a Tuesday, the four of them spread across their usual table with trays of food and varying levels of consciousness. Min was half asleep over his rice. Riko was correcting someone's music theory homework that wasn't hers. Soyeon was watching something across the room with the focused expression she got right before she said something that caused problems.
Emeka followed her gaze.
Jihan was sitting alone at a table near the window, eating with one hand and writing in a small notebook with the other. He did this every day — came to the cafeteria at exactly the same time, sat in exactly the same spot, left at exactly the same time. Like he had scheduled even this.
"I have a theory," Soyeon said.
"No," said Emeka.
"I haven't said it yet."
"I already don't like it."
She turned to him with bright eyes. "I think Seo Jihan doesn't know how to have fun."
"He's eating lunch not defusing a bomb," Emeka said. "Let him be."
"When was the last time you saw him laugh? Smile? Exist like a person who enjoys being alive?"
Emeka opened his mouth. Closed it.
He thought about the almost-laugh in the room three weeks ago. The small shift at the corner of his mouth the night of the Chopin. The careful way he left the bathroom light off every morning without being asked.
"He's just quiet," Emeka said.
"I bet," Soyeon said, leaning forward, "that you cannot make Seo Jihan genuinely laugh before the end of the month."
Riko looked up from the homework. "Oh this is interesting."
"This is nothing," Emeka said. "I'm not doing this."
"Two weeks of convenience store meals on me," Soyeon said. "Anything you want."
Min woke up. "Did someone say free food?"
Emeka looked across the cafeteria at Jihan. At the notebook and the careful posture and the absolute self-contained stillness of him.
He looked back at Soyeon.
"Three weeks," he said. "Free meals for three weeks."
Soyeon grinned. "Deal."
Riko shook her head slowly. "This is not going to go the way either of you think it is."
Nobody listened to her. They rarely did and they were always wrong not to.
Emeka's first attempt was straightforward.
He was funny. He knew he was funny. He had spent his entire life making his mother laugh when she was tired, making his brothers laugh when they were arguing, making strangers laugh in queues and bus stops and waiting rooms. Humor was his natural language.
He tried it on Jihan that evening in the room.
"Okay I need to tell you something that happened in Professor Ahn's class today," he said, dropping onto his bed.
Jihan was at his desk. He didn't turn around but he didn't put his headphones on either which Emeka had learned meant he was listening.
Emeka told him about Min falling asleep during the seminar and snoring at a volume that caused Professor Ahn to stop mid-sentence and stare for a full thirty seconds before quietly continuing like nothing had happened. He told it well — with the timing and the voices and the physical demonstration of Professor Ahn's expression.
When he finished there was a silence.
"That's unfortunate for Min," Jihan said.
"It was hilarious," Emeka said.
"Mm."
Emeka stared at the back of his head. "That was funny. That was objectively funny."
"I understood why it was supposed to be funny."
"Understanding why something is funny and finding it funny are two completely different — you know what, never mind."
Jihan turned a page in his notebook.
Emeka lay back and reconsidered his strategy.
Attempt two was Wednesday.
He found a video on his phone — a compilation of cats being startled by cucumbers, a genre of content he found unreasonably entertaining — and without overthinking it walked over to Jihan's desk and held the phone in front of him.
Jihan looked at the screen. Watched three cats in succession leap approximately four feet into the air in panic.
He looked at Emeka.
"Why," he said.
"Just watch."
Two more cats. One particularly dramatic orange one that knocked an entire fruit bowl off a counter in its escape.
Emeka was already laughing. He could not help it. The orange cat got him every time.
Jihan watched the orange cat destroy the fruit bowl.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then, very quietly, almost to himself: "That one was excessive."
"RIGHT?" Emeka turned the phone toward himself laughing. "He didn't have to do all of that—"
"The cucumber wasn't even near him."
"He saw it from across the room and chose violence—"
"Chose to knock over everything within reach, yes."
Emeka looked at Jihan. Jihan was looking at the phone with an expression that was not quite a smile but was in the neighborhood of one. The careful blank wall was slightly, almost imperceptibly, cracked.
"Send me that video," Jihan said.
Emeka blinked. "What?"
"The video." He looked back at his notebook. "Send it to me."
"I — yeah. Yeah okay." Emeka pulled up Jihan's contact — they had exchanged numbers for practical roommate reasons and nothing else — and sent it. "Done."
Jihan's phone buzzed. He glanced at it. Put it face down on his desk and went back to writing.
But the corner of his mouth was doing the thing again. That almost-thing that wasn't quite a smile but was definitely something.
Emeka went back to his bed feeling unreasonably victorious.
He hadn't made him laugh. Not yet.
But the orange cat had cracked something open.
He could work with that.
- Writer
